Teaching and Learning

February 2, 2015

We at St Vincent’s are working on our School Self-Evaluation process within the literacy framework in association with the National Strategy to improve Literacy and Numeracy for Children and Young people 2011-2020.

Our T&L team have divided up the tasks and are collaborating with all subject departments to engage with literacy in the classroom, a proactive reading management system in the library and an awareness creating exercise within each lesson to highlight literacy across the entire subject choices. It can be suggested that while literacy links may be obvious in English, Irish or the languages and so on, they may be less obvious for a student to spot in the Mathematical or Science subjects. We believe in working collaboratively and inclusively as we embrace our Teaching and Learning objectives that are reflected on and reviewed annually. Please see the St Vincent’s SSE and SIP.

While we are currently continuing our work in literacy we have also embarked on our new initiative in Numeracy. We are in the process of gathering data and information about Numeracy in our school and ways we can work together to support a fluency in Numeracy across every subject area. Our T&L team have a Numeracy task team and together we are working to prepare strategies that will celebrate our strengths and support any area in need of improvement.

We are now working on our Numeracy School Improvement Plan. We are drawing up the evaluation themes, improvement targets (related to students’ achievement), the required actions (related to teaching and learning that will help to achieve the targets), the persons responsible, our time frame for action and our success criteria. We aim to have our SIP ratified at our next Board of Management Meeting.

Much of our SIP is aimed at 1st yr students in an effort to explore the different initiative that are successful and deliver effective outcomes. However, we are also working with 2nd years on our literacy SIP as they began last year.